Free Divider-in-Chief by Kate Obenshain Page B

“Dresden-esque” campaign tactics, referring to the Allies’ overwhelming and indiscriminate bombing of Dresden, Germany, at the end of World War II.
    â€œWhat Obama and his team have accepted is that, while there’s a lot to be said for changing politics and elevating the discourse, your most important job as president is to defend your priorities,” the New Republic ’s Noam Scheiber wrote. 8 “And the way you do that is to win.”

    The Obama way—sowing division to get his way—is essentially undemocratic. Obama seeks to avoid any honest back-and-forth, the messiness of Congress and democracy. He does this by encouraging divisiveness. So, for instance, if he can convince the American people that Republicans are anti-woman, then he can shut down debate on any issues involving women. He won’t need to argue the merits of an idea; he wins without uttering a single cogent thought merely by impugning the motives of the other side.
    But that’s not the way our system works. Our two-party system, our republican form of government, is successful because it is premised on contrasting ideas that offer the American people clear choices. The idea that wins a majority of the people (or their elected representatives) to its side, wins. The system falls apart not when differing ideas exist and are debated vigorously, but rather when the debate is shut down.
    When the debate is either carried out in an undemocratic way—behind closed doors where special interests and money rather than ideas or the people’s interests prevail—or is shut down through scare tactics and division, democracy is diminished. What Obama has done by trying to stifle debate and hide his true intentions is not only divisive, it is also completely contradictory to the essence of America and what makes her great.
    This book is meant to be a thoughtful, clear-eyed examination of Obama’s first term. My hope is that it shines light on the ways Obama has betrayed his promises of unity and post-partisanship and instead embraced division and polarization as a method of governing and campaigning.
    Obama is not the first president to practice the politics of division. But he is the first to do so with so much tenacity and skill, and such complete disregard for our democracy. Obama is indeed a new kind of politician: he is the most divisive president in modern history—one whose divisiveness promises to cut even deeper as the 2012 campaign reaches its climax.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    The Post-American President
    B arack Obama is ambivalent about America. Most American presidents—indeed, most Americans—love their country unconditionally. It’s not that they think America is perfect or are delusional about the wrongs America has committed. But most Americans are convinced that their country, despite its flaws, is still the primary force for good in the world, a bulwark against tyranny, a “shining city upon a hill.” This is one notion upon which Americans, aside from a radical minority, are united: America is good.
    But Obama has said America needs a “fundamental transformation.” He wants to root out what he sees as our smug satisfaction as a nation. As America’s first “post-American” president, Obama has tried to divide the nation against its most fundamental beliefs about itself. Obama has sought to separate the nation from its founding values, and by doing so to redefine what the great American experiment in liberty means.
    In his famous, or infamous, response to a reporter’s question about whether he believes in American exceptionalism, Obama said: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British
exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” 1 The short answer was: Not really. When Mitt Romney made an issue of this, Obama responded the way he often does: by talking about himself. He said